Tesla basically cooked the books to show one last quarter of positive cash flow | Hacker News Reader

Tesla basically cooked the books to show one last quarter of positive cash flow

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39 pointsdoener13 comments

https://xcancel.com/FredLambert/status/2047089101460099581

> but the fact that so-called "smart money" on Wall Street is still buying into that shit baffles me

I will get downvoted for this, but my opinion is this is because the stock market isn’t “real”, it’s just a sentiment consensus machine.

I disagree with 'just'. A lot of the money in the market is savings and retirement money that is far removed from sentiment.

But what about the people who manage those funds' investments?

To be clear: I think some of the "sentiment" is from "serious" investors who care about fundamentals.. so there's some pool of people betting against each other based on that... but overall the market isn't necessarily tied to how well a company is doing. It's a casino.

> But what about the people who manage those funds' investments?

Some combination of trading strategy (to include sentiment but like Fidelity 2045 isn't doing HFT), payola, and buy-and-hold. Possibly with some anti-sentiment hedging.

Remember I am not claiming sentiment trading doesn't exist, I am disputing that the market is "just sentiment" - either literally or hyperbolically.

> overall the market isn't necessarily tied to how well a company is doing. It's a casino.

Lot of daylight between "sometimes hype is a factor" and "it is basically roulette".

Investors are not limited to looking at just the books.

Another very funny 'fact' - Tesla Semi. If you look at their quarterly releases:

- until 2025 it was listed as Pilot Production

- in Q1 2025 it moved to Construction

- in Q4 2025 it moved to Tooling

- in Q1 2026 it moved ... back to Pilot Production !

Everybody knows they just make up stuff as they go, but it's quite hilarious to watch. 1 Trillion $ company. I just can't wait for this house of cards to finally fall.

I’d be more interested in this if Fred didn’t spend his entire existence on saying negative things about Tesla and Elon. They have over 40 billion in cash in the bank. That was supposedly just a made up number as well

Fred has switched his business model to cater to every reader that hates Elon. So it doesnt matter to him

I see it like he’s one of the only outlets not regurgitating lying press releases and actually calling out the truth.

I always see Fred attacked on HN, but I never see anyone cite false statements he’s made. He’s just a bad person for hating on Tesla. As if it’s bad for a writer to critically cover a company doing bad things.

Nearly all the media is negative against Tesla and Elon all the time.

Is this meant to prove something or are you just griping?

I'm showing that in reality the media is generally lying about Musk, in a bad way, nearly all the time.

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